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Will Bowdler
19b07ae36c53d7b43f80d7176936c6508548c97dff7379db2ffe45651294113f
Justa fella from Mississippi who loves Jesus and my wife

Secularism ruins everything beautiful

Teach me to number my days that I may gain a heart of wisdom

There is no such thing as being unbiased

Someone needs to go ahead and write the micro-sat layer to bitcoin before its needed and some centralized authority tries to do it

World peace is not possible apart from universal submission to Christ

I have victory in Jesus. He saved my soul and set me free

Christmas is about the Son of God

I want to use every minute to its fullest extent

I used to say "the American dream is a mirage", meaning that the affluence that we are able to achieve under the American system is a trick from the devil to keep us from seeing the depravity of our souls and the true nature of reality. It keeps us from seeing how the outside world really is. These things are true to an extent, but overall, the sentiment was misplaced. It is true that Satan uses wealth to make lost men think they are "full" when they actually are empty. He can use wealth and affluence to distract us from the suffering and true injustice that is going on outside of our purview. But I've come more and more to appreciate the affluence of America as a gift from God, and not something to be despised as a trick from Satan. I get to wake up each morning and enjoy a cup of hot coffee in a peaceful area. I learned the 'mirage' way of thinking from people who do the same. I don't get that in Cuba or Venezuela. The USA has deep issues yes. But I am thankful to God for its blessings.

I pray He preserves them for my children and grandchildren and rescues the country from the grimy hands of the secularists.

I'm responding there to something within the Christian world, but the same principles apply

Lol, but is that authoritative that you can't know everything? What authority are you appealing to? I'm just trying to show you that what you are saying makes no sense and is contradictory. But no, I don't know everything. Read this: https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqsrwtlcgkdv7xltyyze0e787cd8gm04y82csjx42fu2cevrdv9vgkqvh6mjl

Read Isaiah 53. It was written hundreds of years before Jesus was born and it clearly prophesies His coming before He came. Then submit your life to Christ and become Christian.

But sir, you have unprovable faith in yourself. You believe that your own statements on the lack of authority in the world are authoritative. Thinking objectively is better for the soul. And living in a subjective no-authority fashion is death to the soul. There is a promise of freedom that such a conviction gives, but its just empty. Come to Christ! John 1

Do you believe that your statement that there is no authority is authoritative?

Subjectivist nazis:

There is a certain kind of conviction in the Reformed Christian world that, when it encounters claims of hard, concrete objective truth (the confident assertive kinds) responds in the following fashion: "You don't have a monopoly on the truth!" "You just think you are right and everyone else is wrong." "That's just your interpretation." "That's just your application (of the Bible)." "You think everyone who disagrees with you is wrong."

I find all these statements incredibly naive for a few reasons.

1. They mean nothing, and have nothing to do with the nature of whatever claim is being made. You don't have to be the source of truth (only God is) to be right about the truth. Your interpretation of the facts isn't wrong by nature of it being an interpretation. Your application of the Bible doesn't lack moral authority that binds others by nature of it being an application. I think I am right about Jesus being the Messiah, and everyone else who doesn't think that is wrong, but that says nothing about whether or not the claim that I am making is OBJECTIVELY true.

2. The hypothetical retorts above are just Christian expressions of the postmodern spirit of the age, which equates certainty with arrogance and undermines claims to objective truth almost entirely on the basis of the fallibility of the one making the claim. Such people treat some truths as unknowable to an extent. Or they are so debatable that if we ever do speak about our convictions about such things, we must do so in terms of probability. "It seems to me..." "You should really consider..." "I believe..."

But the reality of the situation is that God made the world in such a way where fallible human beings can know the infallible God, and they can correctly know what the infallible God thinks about thinks about things. In other words, God has created us with the capacity to be right.

All this being said, I'm not negating the fact that we can be very confident concerning things that we are just dead wrong about. On the other hand, we can also be confident about convictions that God also happens to hold. Again, in other words, we can be right.

So, yes we should be humble when we don't have all the facts necessary or when we haven't studied a hard topic in depth. We shouldn't make confident assertions about things that we don't understand. The apostle Paul condemns that. But this does not equate to a "I'll believe what I believe about ethics and you believe what you believe." That's what the postmoderns do. My truth is my truth. Your truth is yours. Bearing with the weaker brother amounts to acknowledging that said brother is OBJECTIVELY wrong about his conviction not to eat vegetables, and that he is "failing" in the words of the apostle Paul (Romans 15:1), but deciding to bear with him and that faulty conviction nonetheless out of love. Romans 14 doesn't require that the strong brother speak in terms of probability when it comes to his correct convictions on the relationship between Christians and food, but it does require not despising the brother who is wrong about the matter.

Resist the urge to reject a claim just because it is spoken confidently. Doing the work of discussing the objective facts around a claim is at times hard, but we still should. God's word speaks to everything authoritatively. Sometimes it speaks to it explicitly, and sometimes it speaks to it in principle.

Let me give a sample of the sort of assertions I am talking about. Using the F words casually is a sin, even though the Bible never addresses that word specifically. Sending your children to the government schools to be discipled by the secularists is a sin. Sending your unequipped child to the public schools to be a "light" and a "missionary" is a sin and incredibly moronic. The fiat money system is a corrupt vehicle of theft.

These assertions do not stand or fall on the basis that I am saying them confidently or on my fallibility as a fallen man, but they stand or fall by whether or not I am applying the word of God and understanding His world in an objectively correct manner.

So don't brush people's claims off just because they are confident. Deal with the facts. Don't be a subjectivist nazi that demands that unless someone incessantly speaks in probabilities they are guilty of being "arrogant".

And sometimes we are wrong, and we should admit that when we are. But if you have studied the evidence of a thing and have come down on a concrete conclusion, don't back down unless someone shows that objectively your conclusion is wrong.

Grace and peace. May God eliminate epistemic postmodern goo thought.

Replying to Avatar Contra

Thinking about my last note, I had this thought as well.

The gap between engagement quality and follower count reveals something interesting about how attention works on Nostr. When we consistently find ourselves drawn to smaller accounts for substantive dialogue, we’re seeing the gap between visibility and actual value. Just because someone got here early or built a large network doesn’t mean they’re offering the most interesting perspectives.

Without an algorithm, smaller accounts face a pure discovery problem. They’re not being suppressed, but they’re not being surfaced either. The best conversations often happen below the visibility threshold, with people who take time to think through their responses and genuinely engage rather than broadcast. These accounts offer the kind of interaction that makes social protocols worth participating in, but they rely entirely on people like you actively seeking them out and responding.

What makes your observation valuable is that it points to something many of us probably feel but don’t articulate. The most rewarding exchanges aren’t happening where the follower counts suggest they should be. They’re happening in replies from accounts with 240 followers who actually read what you wrote and had something thoughtful to add.

So this is both an encouragement and a thank you to those Nostriches; your contributions matter more than your reach suggests. The people finding you and engaging with your ideas are getting far more value than the metrics reflect. And to everyone making the effort to engage back, as you do, you’re solving the discovery problem one genuine interaction at a time. 🫡

That’s how good networks get built.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Yes. The internet can often foster superficial thinking. Its good to see deeper interactions on Nostr. I pray the Lord makes it more popular

This is the day that the Lord has made! I just discovered Nostr