I'm shocked Lemmy has so many users. Feels like only a few thousand.
I'm shocked Lemmy has so many users. Feels like only a few thousand.
~Psst...~🐧
Of the things that kept me a Christian, least important to me was the historicity of the Bible, even though, to this day, I still have a high regard for the Bible as a historical document.
The second most important was the evidence of the effect of God in the lives of the people around me at church.
But the most important, beyond anything else, was the subjective experience of "the Spirit". I wasn't pentacostal, but I was all-in as a Christian; It sounds so woo-woo, but I don't know if most people are aware how convincing a truly "spiritual" experience is, even most Christians, since most Christians seem to be cessationist about the most basic interactions with the Spirit (not just healing, prophecy, speaking in tongues, etc.), even if their theology says otherwise. For example, whenever I had a big decision to make or something I was anxious about, I would find a place where nobody could hear me, sing a few hymns, read a few Bible verses picked totally at random, and pray-- not about my decision, just prayer in worship of God-- and without ever actually addressing my issue, within a short time, I almost always had a profound peace about which choice to make, even when that decision went against my insecurities, my rational thought, my will, my perceived abilities, or all of the above. I didn't know or even care the degree to which praying for "stuff" affects the outside world, but I knew prayer affected me and made me a better person.
There are even little "tests" you can contrive out of the Bible to experience "the Spirit". There's a verse, 1 Corinthians 12:3, that says that nobody can say "Jesus is Lord" except by the Spirit. (Obviously, anyone can say the literal words, but to actually mean it is harder.) Anyway, I know some Christians who take this literally, and taught me to pray the words "Jesus is Lord", and when I did, something deep inside always responded, "Amen!". Romans 8:16 could be used the same way, i.e. "I am a child of God". Really, any Bible verse or anything I knew with 100% certainty would elicit the same response. But trying the same experiment with any other phrase would only leave me feeling gross inside.
Anyway, I started to have doubts in the mid 2010s. First was the realization that other people's testimony of their spiritual experiences wasn't terribly reliable. For example, I once went to a prayer meeting while visiting friends in a rural, less educated town, and, while for the most part I had a good time, I was rather culture-shocked by the fast and loose way the Christians there used (and meant) the word "miracle" to describe positive but entirely mundane life events. Like I'm glad your brother-in-law saw an incremental improvement in his cancer this week, but, I mean, the rain falls on the just and unjust alike; it seems more superstitious than spiritual that you credit his improvement entirely on last week's prayer meeting. But whatever, it's a small thing and it doesn't really matter.
But then I noticed a similar trend in the Christians I looked up to. This isn't a spiritual example, but my church was politically mixed, and while I didn't care too much that my friends were supporting this candidate or the other, there was a definite uptick in cognitive dissonance from the 2015 political realignments, leading to people convincing themselves of viewpoints they didn't even remember they disagreed with just last week. The ability to rewrite history en masse with no knowledge it was ever rewritten was something I'd never experienced so viscerally prior to that. (I get that people have a tendency to believe whatever they want to believe, but I'd never seen it at this scale and to people so mentally stable and intelligent.) I finally started to understand how so many secular Bible historians could agree that the early disciples of Jesus genuinely believed they witnessed Christ die and rise again yet completely discount the story as inaccurate. Mass hallucinations don't work that way, I always thought.
Then it happened to me too. Now, I recognize that any impression or feeling or answer to prayer from the Spirit is going to be, in many ways, ambiguous. With the exception of those moments of profound peace, you kinda just get a pretty good idea of what you "heard" from the Spirit and accept that there's always the chance you misunderstood. But it was the former, moments of profound peace, that caused me, for example, to turn down work that would've pulled me away from my congregation at home to another town further away, despite already being out of a job at the time. This was a bad move, financially, and eventually I ran out of money and got evicted. Now, the Bible doesn't make that many concrete, single-variable, testable promises about what's supposed to happen to a Christian walking with God, but one of the one's that's strongly implied is that if you "seek first the kingdom of God", your basic needs will be provided (Matthew 6:31-33). I get that there are going to be exceptions to this, and I'm not trying to imply a prosperity Gospel, but I don't live in a third world country and I wasn't being persecuted and there was no reason to be struggling financially in my position short of irresponsibility. I was genuinely "seeking first the kingdom", and the result was personal failure. And whether or not I've taken the Bible too far to contrive a promise that isn't actually there doesn't really matter, because the Spirit said it was a promise, or so I thought. Clearly, I misunderstood.
The problem is, if I misunderstood the most obvious, unambiguous things that the Spirit told me, nothing is trustworthy.
The other problem is that I had been noticing that it didn't seem like I was spiritually growing as much, despite staying out of sin and following the Bible to the capacity I was able. Christianity clearly had made me a better person from the moment I converted from atheism until several years after, but it seemed like whatever character flaws I still had after five to ten years were just "stuck" in place, and, in fact, this seems to be the normal Christian experience. My pastor mentioned to me a book he had been reading-- I wish I could remember an author or title-- that mentioned that the average Christian is good for about seven years, and then they become a warm body for the rest of their lives. He meant it as an admonishment to continue walking with God, but seeing as I thought I was walking with God, I looked around the church and was horrified to slowly realize that this characterization matched my experience of the Church. It's still the same God; He didn't change. So what changed? Some of the best people I ever knew I knew from church, but they still had rough edges that were never addressed. If anything, the congregation was just getting more cult-like and rigid ("rigid" in a religious way, not in any actual adherence to the Bible) over time.
Eventually, I found myself overwhelmed with doubts. I started running little spiritual experiments. Once, I was taking a shower, and I started doing the "Jesus is Lord" experiment, except that I found that with a little mental gymnastics, I could coax the same response from random objects; like, I could say "shampoo", and something inside would say, "Amen".
After that, the idea that "the Spirit" was all in my head seemed more plausible than the existence of God. So that was basically the end for me.
The problem on Lemmy is that this gets combined with overgeneralized binary thinking, and all loosely "conservative" people get strawmanned as the intolerant outgroup, which, when this happens, actually does make you the guilty party.
The earlier kill screen just happened today by Fractal. He got the single into level 155.
Mint, and anything else that requires PPAs. Last time I distrohopped, I had a rule that if I couldn't install Librewolf in under a minute or two, it wasn't worth the trouble.
Mind you, this was before flatpaks were big, but I also own a potato and don't want to waste space on flatpaks.
You had me until STAR. STAR is just approval voting with extra steps, since min/maxing your ballot is the easiest way to game it, and, perhaps I'm missing something, but I have no idea how a runoff is actually supposed to stop it. Seems like a waste to give a middling score to someone I'd want in the 2nd place spot. I'm open to alternatives to RCV, but I don't see STAR as an improvement.
Too hot, but every other time this has happened in the last several months, they've been able to spread dirt and gravel on top to make a temporary road.
Minecraft. It desperately needs some QoL improvements for it to be anything but tedious.
We do what we always do. We fight the baseless propaganda we hate with the baseless propaganda we like, and then when called out on it, we justify its posting by saying, "Isn't it crazy how easily this could be true though? It's like there's no difference between truth and satire these days!"
/s, obviously
I'm not entirely sure what you're saying either, but nature vs nurture wasn't settled in nurture's favor. It's somewhere in between.
Adults are worse at passive learning than kids, but focused learning works just fine. You're probably better off buying/pirating something like rosetta stone than you are watching sitcoms.
DuckDuckGo might be more private, but it won't solve the SEO problem. I know they have some of their own trackers, but in practice duckduckgo is basically a front-end for Bing.
Either scalloped with cheese, boiled in chicken broth until the broth boils off and the potatoes are basically already mashed for you, or my laptop.
It's the micromanagement. When earlier games became tedious, I could just pick a quicker game speed, and I would suddenly feel like I was playing with more momentum. But in VI, it actually kills momentum, as if driving the slightly faster route to work at the cost of particularly frustrating traffic, since the most tedious micro isn't turn-based, but city-based. You only have to plan districts/improvements once per city, so I find I can still have fun with VI if I play suboptimally (i.e., tall) on tiny maps and with mods that let me cram more civilizations into the game. I've probably put in a few hundred hours this way.
But I'd rather just play IV or V.
Depending on when this picture was taken, it's just the outermost layer that's solid. The lava flows from underneath.
Voting is anonymous. He would have to tell someone how he voted for anyone to know. Unless you mean the primaries, in which case, he'd have to register for the party primary he wanted to vote in ahead of time. Having grown up in PA, I can tell you that it's common practice to change parties depending on which party has the more consequential primary. I've done this myself, multiple times. Maybe he's right wing. Maybe he's left wing. But Lemmy propagandists aren't going to wait to find out.
First of all, thanks for being on Lemmy. I get nothing out of it when the lefty hivemind argues against a strawman. At least you give us the real thing. Fuck gh0stcassette.
Second of all, Trump only campaigned on a populist platform in 2016. He railed against CEOs, various special interests, and other "swamp creatures" under the premise that he was going to fund his own campaign and didn't need their money. It was honestly kind of refreshing, even if he was ultimately full of shit and failed to deliver. But I haven't heard Trump's 2016 rhetoric in a long time. Not regarding the ruling class. Maybe he still says "drain the swamp" now and then, but many of those who opposed Trump in 2016, e.g. Wall Street, now largely support him, and Trump openly panders to them for their donations. It's not that people in power hate him; it's just the people you don't like in power who hate him.
Vote third party if you hate the elites.
He also got the level 155 crash today. Second person to ever beat the game.
I can't tell if the mirror is flush with the tile or if it was just outlined in grout, but either way, this contractor cares about the details. I would've just slapped the mirror on top.
Edit: Someone help me out. Is that sink really small, or are the tiles on the top sides of the sink extra long as part of the illusion? Are the white tiles on the left wall square?
I hate that there's no showerhead though.
You can skip this comment if you're avoiding anything arch-based; I don't have any additional distro suggestions beyond what's already listed (they really are mostly the same), but in regard to the arch-based suggestions, I would only add that you can reduce the maintenance by choosing a DE with a slower update cycle (e.g. XFCE or any WM) and, more importantly, remembering that you don't actually have to update your system every day. Even once a month is probably fine. I don't get the impression you want vanilla Arch though; Endeavor or even Manjaro minimal will have the defaults you're looking for, or literally any other non-Arch distro if the AUR isn't important to you.
I don't hate flatpaks, but flatpaks require more disk space than the same apps from traditional repositories, and they only support a handful of the most common default themes. Since I only ever use older and slower computers, my disk space is limited, and I like to rice my desktop, I personally avoid them. But your use-case may differ.
Sometimes you can literally just go to the youtube invidious channel of a professor at a big name college, if it's the kind of topic where a lecture series alone can provide the education you're looking for.
I disagree. I think it's inevitable. They already have the final hundred levels mapped out, and there are long stretches that are completely safe. The challenge will be levels where you can't take singles and also the levels where you have to push down on every piece, but compared to what's already been accomplished, it's only a matter of time.
Wait, most people agree that Walter starts off as a decent man?
Long live GOG.
It does not run well. You can't see the performance difference between KDE and XFCE on neofetch, but you absolutely can on on old machine.
Source: I have an old computer.
How important is the Windows-style desktop? If the VM is designed for one thing and one thing only, I'd pick any minimal WM that can alt-tab, say JWM, and then just add Firefox and Thunderbird to the autostart file.
I've never dived into this, but if electronic keyboards are just glorified midi-controllers, I'd have to think you could find a FOSS solution. If they're not simply midi-controllers, I wouldn't begin to know. I'd imagine you might have an easier time with keyboards from the 90s or whenever.
Enable the chaotic AUR and you won't even have to build from source.
A GUI to build these EWWidgets I suck at making. The only reason I'm using them is the fancy animations, otherwise xfce4-panel or tint2 would be fine.
You mean the forward party? "No Labels" is something different.
Edit: No Labels do market themselves as "moderate" though. But from what I've seen, it's more of a "corporations' dystopian version of bipartisanship" moderate rather than "roughly middle-ground views of average Americans" moderate.
I was so, so very wrong. And I'm quite happy about it.
Honestly, I'm just glad you can feel comfortable enough on Lemmy to post something like that. Fuck you, and let's be friends.
People think Biden may actually do it? I hope I'm wrong, but I think that's pure fantasy. One ego is definitely bigger than the other, but you don't become President by being a good person.
Whenever I use a touchpad without physical buttons, I usually disable the middle button entirely. It's more of a hammer-to-mosquito solution than what you were asking, but it's as easy as adding this command to the autostart file (on Xorg): xinput set-button-map "Name-of-your-Touchpad-goes-here" 1 0 3 4 5 6 7, where "Name-of-your-Touchpad-goes-here" can be found with xinput list --name-only.
Look at the way the light reflects on the far right between the sink and the mirror. I think that's tile.
Edit: Or the top of the lights, the underside of the top square.
Beware that, on Arch, "once you've got it set up" can be a loaded statement. Once your OS is running and all your programs reinstalled, there will still be a dozen little configuration files somewhere that you don't know about and that will annoy you until you spend the time to problem solve. If you let those problems linger, it can lead to a "struggle never end[s]" situation. Part of the beauty of Manjaro is sensible defaults. But if you want to try out Arch, you should. It's not hard; it's just annoying for a while.
Thank you for providing an actual answer. Most of the comments in this thread are condescending as hell.
Speak for yourself. Besides, all-or-nothing privacy is a false dichotomy. Giving out less personal data is still better than giving out everything, and you don't need 100% privacy to be unprofitable to advertisers.